


Statement of Anna Köhler

by Flammenkobold



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Creepy, Forests, Gen, Harz, Mentions of Blood, Statement, Walpurgis Night - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-31
Updated: 2017-10-31
Packaged: 2019-01-27 11:04:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12580348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flammenkobold/pseuds/Flammenkobold
Summary: Statement of Anna Köhler, regarding two encounters in different forests.





	Statement of Anna Köhler

I’m visiting a friend for a few weeks in London. When I told her my story after a few pints of beer, she said I should come here and tell you guys too. Write it down. Have a record of it somewhere. I don’t think this story is for you guys though, because I don’t quite believe that it really happened to me. But my friend insisted, she said for prosperity, no wait, that is not the word I’m looking for, pro- propriety? Yes I think that was the word she used.

I’m sorry for my English, it isn’t my first language, but I’m trying to improve. That’s why I thought it was a good idea to visit a friend here before my ‘real’ life starts. Polish up my English. I’ve finished my studies in April and will start my job at the 15th of November. So I thought it would be a good idea to travel around for a bit, before I am tied to 25 days a year of paid vacation.

There were other places I’ve travelled to and one of them is where my statement, I suppose, takes places. Well, part of it anyway.

Perhaps I should start at the beginning, though.

I grew up in the Harz mountains in Germany. I don’t know if you’ve heard of them or know anything about them beyond what Goethe wrote down in one of his most famous works ‘Faust’. It’s home to a mountain called ‘Brocken’, the first and highest mountain in northern Germany, a place where, allegedly, witches meet during Walpurgis Night, the night from the last day of April to the first day of May. 

The legend goes that on that night all the witches meet in Thale, a small town close to my home, at a place called ‘Hexentanzplatz’ the witches dancing place. From there they fly to the Brocken to meet up with the devil and celebrate that special night. 

Now every year small towns around the Harz will lit bonfires and people will dress as witches and devils to have some fun and to get tourists in. Usually someone dressed as the will hold speeches, mocking the current political situation and other topics. It does take away the mystery the night probably once held and has become very commercialized.

In my family my sister at least seems to take it somewhat serious, or as much as a self-declared white witch can. She doesn’t believe that it is a festivity that celebrates the devil though, but another day in which the veil between our world and the ghost world is very thin, like on Halloween. What she does believe in is a lot of other myth from the area and my parents have not done anything to dissuade her from that, with all the stories they told us as children.

Let me clarify something: I don’t believe in any of that. But I think it’s like for some people going to church is like and believing in God. They don’t actively believe, but it’s tradition to go to church on Christmas or on Easter. They went to church so often that they can’t help to pick up some things, like Christ was born on Christmas Eve and died on the cross and so on. Be nice to your neighbours, be nice to the old man on the road side, or he might turn into an angry mountain ghost, don’t look into the heavy bag the nice woman on the river gave you, or all the gold will turn into pine cones.

Don’t wander the woods at night on Walpurgis or the Wild Hunt might take you.

These kind of things.

But none of the myths and legends I know of, would explain what happened to me in that night. Or what I hallucinated that night. See I don’t think what I remember actually happened. It was late and dark and I hit my head. But perhaps you should judge for yourself.

Two years ago I drove to a Walpurgis party in Elbingerode where some of my old friends still live. We wanted to watch the witches’ dance on the small stage they had set up, as the niece of one of my friends, Andreas Peters, was performing as well. 

After that we stayed around to see the bonfire get lit and ate something, danced to the terrible music and mostly talked. I didn’t drink anything that evening and in my opinion that made the whole event look even more pitiful. The fire wasn’t that big and although a few people were dressed up as witches, most were just standing around in their normal clothing. Some of the kids running around seemed to have fun at least. The speech the ‘Devil’ gave fell somewhat flat and was certainly not as funny as he thought it was.

I got to see my old friends, though, and heard about their lives and told them about mine. I’ve just started my Master studies in Berlin the semester before and had found a nice shared flat, so there was plenty to tell from the big city.

As the evening dragged on it got colder and we moved closer and closer to the dwindling fire. Two of the others decided to get more beer and the girls decided it was the right time go to the toilet. As I was not in need of either I stayed back by the fire and decided to wait for them to return. I liked having that moment to myself, watching some kids run around the fire, seeing the flames dance, red and yellow, creeping their way through the wood feeding them.

When we were children my sister always insisted that we dance around the fire at least once on Walpurgis. She was in Thale that year, with her new girlfriend and some of their friends, and I was sure that she still would make sure to stick to that little ritual of hers. 

Perhaps it was that thought of her and the growing boredom of waiting for my friends to return, that I started to sway to the music. The flames flickered, almost approvingly, and as my friends were still held up at the queue for beer or the relief of said beer, I thought why not. So I made my way around the small fire, occasionally twirling around in time to the music.

By the time I made my round, my friends were back and made fun of me for a bit. They were a bit drunk, but wasn’t I supposed to be sober, something like that. I laughed along with them and we soon talked about other things, until the firework interrupted us. After that I left, as it was getting late and I wanted to go back to Berlin relatively early the next day.

There is a road leading from Elbingerode to Heimburg where my parents live and where I stayed. It is, in my belief, one of the places in the Harz mountains where you can see why people in the past would make up all kind of stories about ghosts and witches and monsters living in the region, especially at night. There is no mobile phone connection either and in the middle of the night, with no one else around, it is one of the few places that I find truly scary. It didn’t help that it was a full moon and that just recently a woman got robbed on the road.

We call it Trektal. I’m sure there is a story behind that too, there always is in the Harz, but you’d have to ask my sister, she knows these things. If there is a myth or legend she hasn’t heard about the Harz, I’d be surprised.

The drive isn’t that long, but the road is crappy with a lot of bends and aside from the moon it was pretty dark, so I drove relatively slowly even though I know the road well. I wasn’t that far away from my hometown Heimburg, when my car broke down.

It just stopped, all lights went out as well as the motor and I couldn’t turn it back on. I still think it might have been the battery in some way? Even though everything seemed normal when my parents retrieved it the day after.

My phone was out too, but like I said, it wouldn’t be of much help either, as there is no connection there anyway. My first thought was to wait until another car passed, but after two hours with no one driving by, I decided to try my luck and walk home. I wasn’t too keen on the thought, as it was dark and still relatively cold outside, not to mention some animals. I didn’t really feel like running into a boar or a stag. Still, sitting in the car the entire night, didn’t seem that appealing to me either.

I knew the road and that I was maybe half an hour to an hour's walk away from home. I took the torchlight I keep in my trunk with me and started walking along the road. The moon clung low to the sky, it's pale light enough to see by, unless a cloud raced passed it. Mist formed at the bottom of the trees flanking the road, blanketing the forest floor in a thin sheen of white, almost like it was snow.

The road seemed to stretch and stretch and I was sure that I should've already arrived home, but I couldn't tell how long I've been walking. By the third time I checked my watch I noticed that it too had stopped working. It felt like I've been walking for hours, the road winding its way through the forest, but I hadn’t reached any town and no car had been passing me by. The moon didn't seem to move either, but that could've been my imagination.

I was there, seemingly all alone in the world, when I heard it.

"Hello?" a voice called out to me and I almost screamed at the unexpected noise. "Hello, you there!" it said. It sounded like a woman's voice coming from the forest. I shone my light into the direction I heard her voice coming from, immensely relieved that at least something in my possession still worked.

The light fell on the silhouette of a young woman with long dark hair and a pale face. I thought she looked like she'd fit right into the horror movies my sister loves so much.

"Hi," I called back tentatively and saw her lips split into a grin. Even in the dim light at the distance I could see the white of her teeth standing out against the red of her lips.

Weiß wie Schnee, rot wie Blut und so schwarz wie das Ebenholz am Fensterrahmen, I remember thinking. As white as snow, as read as blood and as black as the wood on the windowsill.

"Are you lost?" she asked me and I felt uneasy giving her an answer. It felt like whatever I was going to say was as important as how I was going to say it.

"My car broke down," I said, "but I know the way."

She slowly walked closer to me and I had the urge to back away, but behind me there was nothing but forest and it seemed kind of silly to run down the street I've been walking on for some time.

"A pity," she said. I didn't know what she meant by it.

"Are you lost?" I asked her and she threw her head back and laughed.

"I'm never lost," she finally answered and smiled brightly at me.

I wanted to run in that moment, but before I could even take one step she was right there in front of me. She shouldn't have been. She'd been standing a good 20 meters or so from me, she couldn't have moved that fast. But she was there, one hand sneaking around my back, her breath on my neck and I could smell the rancid breath coming from her mouth. Vile and utterly disgusting, like something rotten.

I was so scared in that moment, I couldn't even scream.

She sniffed at me and made a low sound of disgust in the back of her throat. "You've been dancing around the fire," she said with such venom. Before I could answer her, she pushed me back so hard I fell down. My head hit a rock at the side of the road and everything went black.

A couple of guys found me around three in the morning on their way back from their Walpurgis celebration. I spent two days in the hospital because of my concussion. I didn’t tell anyone my story, as I wasn’t sure I had hallucinated everything after all. Perhaps it was just a side effect of slipping on wet pine needles and hitting my head. A fever dream or a side effect of hitting my head so hard.

I thought that was it. It wasn’t.

The year after, at the end of April, I went to visit some friends from university in A Coruña in Galicia in Spain. They had started their Bachelor’s degree when I started my Master’s and we met a party for new students. They were taking a year abroad with the Erasmus program and had invited me to stay with them for a week or so, as I too had spent my semester abroad in A Coruña. University had already started for me, but I had only a few classes left before I could sign-up for my Master thesis and some of them wouldn’t start until a few weeks in. The few classes that had already started, I only needed to pass the exam in without any attendance.

I like Galicia a lot, partly because it reminds me of the Harz mountains, with its forests and mountains and story of witches.  _ Os maigas _ the’re called there and I had to bring my sister a book about local folklore when I told her about them. 

At Walpurgis we went camping for a night in the mountains of Galicia, near to Pontevedra. It was a coincidence that we picked that day, as one of my friends liked rock climbing and was invited that weekend by some friends.

So I and my other friend joined her. It was a lovely day and I mostly spent it taking videos of the people climbing. In the evening we built a campfire and shared the food everyone had brought. I did drink that evening, quite heavily admittedly. Someone had brought a bottle of Wodka and someone else a bottle of Aguardiente and someone else had brought home made Crema de Orujo.

I remember my sister calling around nine in the evening, asking me how I was, telling me that she was in Schierke this year, another town well known for its Walpurgis nights. I made the mistake and told her about our campfire and she told me to dance around it for her before hanging up. I then made the mistake to tell my friends, who all encouraged me to do it and before long we all were stumbling around the fire, laughing and passing around another bottle.

We went to bed in our small tents not short after, though I couldn’t tell you exactly what time. Later that night I woke up, fumbling my way around for my torch and in desperate need for a toilet, or at least a quiet place to pee in the woods.

It was not as dark outside the tent as one would expect in the middle of a forest. We had camped relatively high in a clearing, so there were fewer trees that let the light of the moon through. The sky was clear, full of stars, twinkling in the darkness like a thousand eyes looking down at our little planet. Where the clearing stopped a soft mist had settled over the ground.

On my way back to my tent a heard a soft noise behind me. The rustling of leaves or the snapping of a twig. I figured it was some animal, maybe a fox. Still I turned around to look back, just in case. And there in the light of my torch she stood.

The woman from the year before. The same woman I’d seen in the Trektal.

She just stood there, smiling at me with too white teeth. I closed my eyes briefly, thinking it must be another hallucination. I  _ was  _ still pretty drunk. 

The next moment I could feel her breath on my face, still as pungent and vile as I remembered. Like rotting meat and blood. I kept my eyes closed, too scared now to even move. My stomach was rolling and if I were to move it would’ve been to throw up.

“There you are again,” she muttered with glee.

She couldn’t have moved that fast, shouldn’t have. She shouldn’t have felt real either. But I could feel her moist breath moving over my skin, could feel her titling her head, leaning in closer to my neck. She drew in a deep breath, sniffing me and then spat down in front of me in disgust. 

“You’ve been dancing around the fire,” She repeated her words from last year, with the same venom in her voice. Just like that she was gone. 

I just kept standing there, not moving, until a friend on her own way to the outdoor toilet found me. Linda took me back to her tent, telling me how cold I was. I was glad I could sleep there with her. 

The next day I had a splitting headache and the sun was shining. The forest looked calm and warmly colored. There were a lot of wanderers around. I barely remembered what had happened the night before, except for that deep feeling of utter dread. That too seemed to melt away slowly in the sun, like the mist. Perhaps it was just an alcohol induced hallucination after all.

I haven’t been to any Walpurgis fires this year, in case you are wondering, I was too busy moving the last of my stuff from my shared flat and celebrating handing in my Master thesis. My friend here in London invited me to go on a weekend trip to Wales, taking a walking tour through the countryside. 

I don’t think I will go. I’ve heard the weather isn’t that nice at the beginning of November there anyway.


End file.
